For Zack Zarrillo, starting Many Hats Distribution alongside longtime label veteran Fred Feldman in 2020 was all about creating a dream scenario as a veteran artist manager in the music business for the past 13 years. “We started Many Hats with what I would want as a manager: to know that I’m doing my job well for my clients and also making them the most amount of money possible, while still getting great service,” says Zarrillo, who got his start running a punk blog called Property of Zack while in college and has managed bands like Knuckle Puck ever since. “Many Hats started as a way to leverage my management company’s artist catalog for their own benefit to get them the best rates and to not give up a crazy rate to a distributor.”
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Feldman, who cut his teeth at classic hip-hop label Profile Records in the 1980s and 1990s before embarking on a 25-year run as the head of Triple Crown Records, which he then sold to Round Hill in 2021, had extensive experience working in the indie label world as well as a six-year run at Warner Music Group’s independent label group, and knew himself that the rates that artists and managers were getting from labels and distributors were not always commensurate with the level of service they were getting in order to thrive in the industry. “I’ve heard every pitch, I’ve sat in every meeting, been promised the world, and gotten very little back for it for a higher fee,” Feldman says. “At the end of the day, you could be promised everything, but you’re responsible for your career. So we try to be transparent. That’s part of what a partner should do.”
Now, Many Hats — which offers pure distribution to clients, but also label services, physical distribution, marketing, promotion and more as needed, in exchange for just a 5% cut — has passed a significant milestone: this week, the company is announcing it has paid out $50 million to its artists in just five years in business, a big number for a tiny company without any venture or private equity backing.
Many Hats has done it largely through word-of-mouth, as well as through a hands-on approach, some savvy catalog bets and a focus on growing artists’ physical business, even when they may not have thought of getting into vinyl themselves. The company now has two label imprints, Wax Bodega and Tight Knit; frontline deals with artists like Hot Mulligan, Mayday Parade and Saturdays At Your Place; frontline digital distribution deals with acts like the Pussycat Dolls and frontline physical with Mk.gee and Quadeca; catalog distribution for Green Day (digital), Mitski (digital), Alex G (digital) and Weezer (physical); and partnerships with Crush Management, Monotone Management, deadAir Records (distribution), True Panther Records (manufacturing) and more.
“In the first year we did a million dollars, and that was cool,” Zarrillo says. “And in the second year we did a couple million dollars, and it just has kept on growing. So to me, $50 million just makes it feel like, this is a real thing. We paid out close to $20 million last year, and I hope we can pay out $20 million or more this year. We’re not looking for explosive growth here — we want it to be manageable for ourselves and for our staff.”
Why did you guys form the company?
Zack Zarrillo: I’ve always believed in artists owning their own catalog, parts of it, maybe not everything. The first band I managed, who I still manage, are called Knuckle Puck, a punk band from Chicago. We released three EPs before signing to a label, and the label wanted to buy those three EPs for $10,000 with a 15% royalty rate in 2014. We had those EPs on TuneCore, and the band was making like $2,000 a month. So why would we sell it for $10,000 to make 15%, when that’s how much the band makes in five months?
That kind of kept with me. And I’ve known Fred since I was doing my blog, and we’ve had a really great relationship, and we’ve worked on a lot of different types of projects together. I used to sign bands to his record label. And Fred came to me and said, “Hey, you’re doing this thing, why don’t we make it something else?” And that led to Many Hats.
Fred Feldman: [After selling Triple Crown], I thought I was done with music. But I saw what Zack was doing with his artists, and Many Hats grew out of his desire to make sure these artists have a different income stream by owning some of their music that they’re creating, and we built the company from there. I come from a traditional label background, for the most part in the indie sector, but definitely had a really great look under the hood at the major label system. Zack comes from a management side, but also an independent label side, and I think we balance each other out really well and understand what the artist needs.
You guys have both seen a lot of changes in the business over those years. What was it about where the industry was five years ago that made you want to start this company?
ZZ: At the time for my management company, we had artists making over $200,000 a month on DSPs, just on TuneCore, Distrokid and CD Baby, and someone from a Universal label called me one day and was like, “Hey, why don’t we give you a JV here, and you’ll move all your catalog over, and we’ll take 20% and then you can take whatever percentage you want on top of that?” And I was like, well, I definitely don’t want to do that. But I called Fred, and I remember where I was standing in Philadelphia, it was pouring, and I was standing under, like, a coffee shop to try not to get soaked, and I said, “Hey, I’ve never really thought about putting all this together. I would probably be able to have more power in the marketplace when speaking to, like, Spotify or whoever, if I was able to say our catalogs are doing millions of dollars a year, vs. one or artist on Distrokid.” And he said, “This is a great idea, we should do this thing together, we should go to Merlin to have a deal to go direct with DSPs.”
Given your backgrounds, what did you think artists need from a distribution company, and how have you guys been able to provide that?
ZZ: Digitally speaking, artists need to be getting the best rate they can, and even though we take 5% our per-stream rate is still better than CD Baby or Distrokid or TuneCore. I think you need to have human beings actually answering you, and not slow customer service, or AI chat bots. If something goes right or wrong, we jump in. A couple times a year, we have a song go mega viral in our catalog that we’ve had for years, and we work hard, pitching playlists, marketing opportunities, and doing really well on the physical side. We’re incredibly bullish on physical distribution and physical catalog, and I think that’s another area where a lot of managers or artists just don’t care that much, and we often are able to educate and turn no business into a five or six-figure profit business for artists. And while the digital business is easier, the physical business is really rewarding. I can’t tell you how much an artist who didn’t care about physical six months ago loves to see their records at Rough Trade. We have a lot of experience with physical, and over the last 18 months, we’re seeing that business double for us, and there’s a lot of runway there.
What kind of partnerships have you guys made to be able to offer different services to artists?
FF: On the distribution side, we talk directly to retail, we’re out looking for exclusives, we do a tremendous amount of vinyl manufacturing through plants all over the world, several hundred thousand pieces a year. We can just make it seamless for them. If it’s a project where we are involved in the marketing and promotion, we will build out a team, we talk directly to the DSPs, we’ll start radio internally — we can do the building blocks of getting a record off the ground for a smart budget. We want to pay people, so we don’t want to spend money just to flex our muscles; if there’s no return on it, we’re not in that sort of bells and whistles game. We listen to what their needs are, and then we build out an approach.
There is a tremendous amount of our business which is plug and play, just the pipes. In some of those cases, we’re the ones looking at it and going, “There’s a physical business here. Have you thought about going to retail?” People are looking for community, and record stores are it, and we want to be great partners to them, and we’re doing listening parties, people are showing up in droves at these in-stores. We’re a music company, not a tech company, so some of these strategies and thoughts are a little more old school like the way distribution used to be. And that’s what we want to do.
ZZ: We’re a high-touch company. Every email gets answered. A lot of people are in the unfortunate assumption that, if we’re only giving up a small cut, the company’s not going to care or do a good job. And I want to say, no — we don’t deserve more than 5% for your songs that came out one year, 10 years, 30 years ago for catalog we have, but we still have to do a really good job. We owe you that respect. And because of that, it just travels. We don’t chase anything on the distribution side, everything is 100% word-of-mouth. Our business would probably grow quicker if we chased a lot, but maybe then we wouldn’t be able to commit to our standards. That has worked really well for us.
How have things grown over the last five years to get to this $50 million milestone?
ZZ: We had almost no overhead to start; I was the one ingesting everything, distributing everything, so we were able to run things at a very low cost while we eventually sucked in a lot of catalog that started to throw off slight profit for us. And on our label side, we started to do some more larger releases, bands like Hot Mulligan or Mayday Parade or Arm’s Length. Our business just started growing in different ways. And we manufacture vinyl on behalf of a lot of clients that we don’t distribute, in addition to some that we do distribute. Over the last five years I would guess we’re closer to manufacturing 1 million records.
FF: We got lucky with a couple of records that really started to take off, where we saw the potential at retail. We had a couple of tremendous viral hits; the Pinegrove shuffle was something where the minute the signs were there, Zack was on top of management, we connected them with TikTok. We just connect the dots. And people were hungry for something new. Artists are starting to get their catalogs back, they’re in between management — we can really help them figure out how to best maximize their catalogs and things like that. So it was just very organic and very natural.
You mentioned working with some of these artists like Hot Mulligan — how have you seen them grow within your system, and just as importantly, how have you guys continued working with them, even as they’ve grown, and I’m sure other offers have come in?
FF: We got them right when they were coming out of No Sleep [Records]. We made an EP with them, we did well and it was the right record. That led to their first full-length with us, and that’s where it really connected. At the same time their catalog came in, which we treated as a distribution [project], we were able to go to retail and sell a tremendous amount. This band was playing 300-cap rooms; all of a sudden they’re playing to 1,000 people a night. And then after that first full-length with us, everybody came around. They had major label offers, they were getting better support, money, touring, merch, all this stuff.
ZZ: All of our deals on the label side are one-off deals, and they’re all 10 years or less licenses. That’s what I want as a manager, right? That being said, that puts us at significant risk of losing bands. And Hot Mulligan kind of got a once-in-a-lifetime [offer] elsewhere. We just called them one more time [and they stayed]. And now we have sold 25,000 Hot Mulligan records of their last one that came out in August. That’s astonishing for a pop punk emo band. That’s real teamwork, that’s real cohesion. Most of that is on the band; we’re not here to take all the credit for that. But the stuff does really have to work in unison, and I think we’re all kind of batting above our salary when it comes to Hot Mulligan, the whole team, from the band to management to us. We have paid this band hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it’s proof that you can bet on yourself if you have the right team and you don’t have to just submit to kind of the assumption of, well, to keep growing, we have to go to a major label.
We try to focus on two to six albums a year that we can really sink our teeth into, because we also don’t have the budget like a major or like a funded venture company to just spend wastefully. If we’re going to commit, we’ve got to really make sure we get it back for us and the band.
What does this $50 million milestone mean for you guys?
ZZ: This represents that this business is possible. It’s possible to do it your own way. It’s possible for artists to make a livable wage from music. My favorite day every month is when we pay out a million and a half dollars or more, hopefully, to artists. And we take that part of it really seriously. Fred and I are genuinely very invested in the artists we work with being able to live off this. I think a lot of management companies, with better infrastructure, or a company like ours behind them, could have more of their artists be independent. That continues to be a real focus of ours, and another focus is just distributing more independent labels. There’s more to grow there for us, too.
FF: It’s something that was just an idea that we built into a business. We did this ourselves, and I think this is just the start. This is our year that we’re sort of raising our head. And I think we have a proof of concept of how this can work.
There are so many distribution companies these days, and this is a part of the industry that’s evolving very quickly. How do you see the industry continuing to evolve for distributors, and how do you guys stay ahead?
FF: What we try to do is just do the best work possible. We can’t be concerned with everybody else. We’re in service of the artists and managers, and that’s served us well, and that’s what we’re going to continue.